A pioneer his entire career — from launching GM’s EV1 and transforming semiconductor manufacturing at Applied Materials to founding BHI and leading the homebuilding industry’s digital transformation for 22 years.
Tim Costello has been a pioneer his entire career, and he has made a habit of walking into industries built on craft and rebuilding them around technology and flow. As Technology Planning Manager for Advanced Vehicle Engineering at General Motors, he oversaw the launch of the first modern electric vehicle, the EV1 — a full decade before “EV” was a household word. He then moved to Applied Materials, the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor equipment, as VP of Global Operations, where he drove the transformation of chip manufacturing from a craft system into a lean, flow production system — the work that later put him in the Shingo Prize Hall of Fame.
In 2000 Tim turned that same lens on homebuilding, one of the last big industries still selling the way it had for decades. Rather than launch a startup to compete with builders, he did something harder: he got the fiercest competitors in the business to build shared infrastructure together. The result was Builder Homesite, Inc. (BHI) — the homebuilding industry’s technology consortium — headquartered in Austin, Texas.
For the next 22 years Tim led BHI and its consumer brand BDX (Builders Digital Experience) through the industry’s digital transformation. Under his leadership BHI/BDX became the market leader in digital customer acquisition and experience, its flagship NewHomeSource.com growing into the internet’s most comprehensive catalog of new homes. At its peak the consortium served 1,300+ builders who built more than 60% of the homes in the U.S. Tim retired in 2022; in 2024 BHI/BDX was acquired by Zonda.
Today Tim is CEO & Chairman of Correlated Magnetics Research / PolyMagnet, a deep-tech company that programs magnets to do things ordinary magnets can’t — and he still sits on the boards of several technology companies. He remains a sought-after keynote speaker who challenges traditional thinking and the status quo, now telling builders what he told carmakers and chipmakers before them: the technology wave is coming, and the winners get ready early.
Tim’s insight in 2000 was that no single builder — not even the largest — could out-invest the internet alone, but together they could own their own digital front door instead of renting it from portals. So BHI was formed the way a utility gets built: land the anchors first, then wire up everyone else.
The founding alliance was anchored by five of the nation’s largest home builders — the “biggies” whose backing made the venture credible overnight:
With the anchors in place, the consortium backfilled the rest of the industry — roughly 32 of the country’s largest builders pooling funding and data into one shared platform, NewHomeSource.com. The founding and funding roster grew to include:
From that base BHI kept building shared tools no single builder would fund alone: EX Squared Solutions (2002) for custom web applications, and New Home Technologies (2003), a sub-consortium of builders and product suppliers that produced Envision, the industry’s standardized online design-options platform. The alliance model — competitors cooperating on infrastructure, competing on homes — is what let a fragmented industry move as one, and it is the through-line of everything Tim built.
Tim’s current chapter, Correlated Magnetics Research / PolyMagnet, is pure deep tech. Its correlated-magnetics technology lets a magnet be “programmed” — encoding many tiny magnetic regions (maxels) into a single face — to produce behaviors far beyond the simple “attract” and “repel” of a conventional dipole: precise alignment, self-latching, spring-like hold-and-release, and magnets that grip hard up close but fall away fast at a distance. It is the same Costello pattern one more time — take something everyone assumes is finished, and show it was only getting started.
Tim keynotes PCBC 2026 — the Pacific Coast Builders Conference — on the breakthrough technologies reshaping how homes get designed, built, and sold.
PCBC 2026 · July 28–29, San Diego →